<p>The relatively stiff gait of modern humans minimizes the muscular work done to move the lower limbs and the center of mass. Nonhuman primates, and perhaps our earliest ancestors, use a form of bipedalism in which the ...

<p>Primates and many other animals that move in an arboreal environment often cling, sometimes for long periods, on vertical supports. Primates, however, face a special challenge in that almost all primates bear nails on ...

In order to reduce the energetic cost of controlling internal body temperatures physiologically, animals engage in “behavioral thermoregulatory activities.” These strategies include changing postures, social huddling, and ...

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) females have traditionally been viewed as asocial and solitary, but recent evidence suggests that they are more social than previously believed and may develop differentiated ...

Older mammals experience a decrease in physiological function that impairs their ability to internally regulate body temperature. Behavioral mechanisms can be used to alleviate thermal stress on the body, and thus could ...

<p>A central theme in animal ecology is the study of the relationship between ecology and behavior. This dissertation demonstrates how ecological parameters, particularly food and weather variables, correlate with ranging, ...

<p>Fossil taxa are crucial to studies of brain evolution, as they allow us to identify evolutionary trends in relative brain size and brain shape that may not otherwise be identifiable in comparative studies using only ...

A number of theories posit various social and nonsocial factors as the central drivers of the evolution of intelligence. Cognitive skills, such as transitive interference, that have important implications in both the social ...

<p>Reconstructing locomotor patterns from fossils is crucial for understanding the origins of primates and important transitions in various primate clades. Recent studies suggest that the semicircular canals of the inner ...

<p>Delacour's langurs (<italic>Trachypithecus delacouri</italic>), one of the six limestone langur taxa of Southeast Asia, inhabit isolated, rugged limestone karst mountains in Northern Vietnam, although the reason for ...

<p>During the last six million years, humans shifted from a primarily arboreal lifestyle to a habitually bipedal, terrestrial lifestyle. Australopithecus had a significant bipedal component to its locomotion; whether ...

<p>Humans are champions of prosociality. Across different cultures and early in life, humans routinely engage in prosocial behaviors that benefit others. Perhaps most strikingly, humans are even prosocial toward strangers ...

<p>Primates in the wild face complex foraging decisions where they must assess the most valuable of different potential resources to exploit, as well recall the location of options that can be widely distributed. While ...

<p>There has been a trend toward decreasing skeletal robusticity in the genus Homo throughout the Pleistocene, culminating in the gracile postcrania of living modern humans. This change is typically attributed to changing ...

<p>What makes our minds human? How did they evolve to be this way? This dissertation presents data from two complementary lines of research driven by these orienting questions. The first of these explores the `what' of ...